Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

9. Cannon, 1957, is a classic exploration of the widespread lore claiming that evil spells have actually killed people. He concludes that it is by no means impossible to induce the death of somebody by fatally unnerving him, in effect. “In his terror [the victim] refuses both food and drink, a fact which many observers have noted and which, as we shall see later, is highly significant for a possible understanding of the slow onset of weakness. The victim ‘pines away’ his strength runs out like water, to paraphrase words already quoted from one graphic account; and in the course of a day or two he succumbs” (p. 186).

10. In Dennett, 1978, I proposed a distinction between beliefs and “opinions,” which are (roughly) sentences one would bet on as true (even if one didn’t entirely understand them). Sperber (1975) made a similar division between intuitive and reflective beliefs, and has expanded and revised this analysis in Sperber, 1996.

11. See also Palmer and Steadman, 2004, on the adaptive tactic of literalization of metaphors.

12. My introduction to this somewhat depressing idea came in 1982, when I was told by the acquisitions editor of a major paperback publishing company that her company wasn’t going to bid for the paperback rights for The Mind’s I, the anthology of philosophy and science fiction that Douglas Hofstadter and I had edited, because it was “too clear to become a cult book.” I could see what she meant: we actually explained things as carefully as we could. John Searle once told me about a conversation he had with the late Michel Foucault: “Michel, you’re so clear in conversation; why is your written work so obscure?” To which Foucault replied, “That’s because, in order to be taken seriously by French philosophers, twenty-five percent of what you write has to be impenetrable nonsense.” I have coined a term for this tactic, in honor of Foucault’s candor: eumerdification (Dennett, 2001a).

13. Professor Faith is the successor to Otto in Consciousnesss Explained (1991a), and Conrad in Freedom Evolves (2003c), not to be identified with any actual interlocutor of mine, but expressing, as best I can muster, the objections I have often heard.

14. Philosophers have spent decades dreaming up thought experiments designed to prove or disprove W.V.O. Quine’s principle of the indeterminacy of radical translation (1960): the surprising claim that in principle there could be two different ways of translating one natural language into another natural language and no evidence at all about which one was the right way to translate the language. (Quine insisted that in that case there wouldn’t be a right way; each way would be as good as the other, and there would be no further fact of the matter.) The Philby case can help us see that his claim is not so incredible as it first appears, and appendix D presents a brief discussion of this point (for philosophers only, probably).

15. Philosophers will recognize this as an application of Quine’s theory of meaning (1960), and an extension of his observation that in the great “web of belief,” theoretical statements far from the periphery of empirical confirmation and disconfirmation most readily exhibit inscrutability of reference.

16. Gödel’s Theorem states that if you try to axiomatize arithmetic (the way plane geometry is axiomatized by Euclid—remember high-school geometry?) your system of axioms will be either inconsistent (which you certainly don’t want, since anything at all, falsehoods as well as truths, can be proved from inconsistent axioms) or incomplete—there will be at least one truth of arithmetic, the system’s Gödel sentence, that can never be proved from your axioms. Gödel’s Theorem is provable a priori, but to make it have any real-world application (for instance, to describe limitations on actual, implemented Turing machines), you have to add an empirical premise or two, and this is where problems of interpretation arise to confound the would-be dualist, for instance. See “The Abilities of Men and Machines,” in Dennett, 1978; and the chapter on Roger Penrose in Dennett, 1995b.